The then US President Donald Trump wanted to negotiate a new, better deal with Iran when he canceled the nuclear agreement that the Obama administration had painstakingly negotiated in 2015 a good five years ago. As is well known, this new, better deal never existed – and Trump didn’t have a plan B in his pocket.
Virtually unmolested by disruptive inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) – whose regular inspections were part of the original agreement – Tehran has since been able to enrich uranium, which it has done diligently. The country was able to reduce the breakthrough time to produce enough material for a nuclear bomb from about a year to a few weeks. This is not good news for the security architecture of the Middle East, but also far beyond.
The West is correspondingly long-suffering and is trying to revive the nuclear agreement. Apparently Tehran has no interest in that, and for months the regime has allowed the negotiations to end in a diplomatic impasse.
The regime’s brutal crackdown on the country’s opposition, which has been daring to protest for months, makes any concessions to get Tehran back to the negotiating table basically impossible. It’s a diplomatic tightrope act. And so it is becoming increasingly clear: the only alternative to a “bad deal” was always a nuclear-capable Iran. It’s closer now than ever before. That doesn’t sound like a good deal.
